Alfie finally succumbed to the iPhone and week-one of ownership turned out to be busy and  inspirational.

I used to think, around the time that mobile-phones first came out [yes, I am that old], that it was nice ‘to be out when you were out’. That being constantly contactable was a pain in the arse; that I would soon turn into the character from The Fast Show who would shout loudly on his mobile to draw attention to the fact he was a busy exec on the move, in demand: “I CAN’T TALK NOW, I’M ON THE TRAIN’… he would shout at the top of his voice. Well, being out and about just got a lot more fun.

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.The Killer-Apps for mobile me?

Mapping and Navigation: I’d been into Google Maps for a while and – in combination with Google Earth and satellite views, street view and such like – they proved to be a powerful tool for business and for pleasure, and just for convenience. With all that power in my hand, this week I have been able to…..

• Navigate my way around Tokyo even better than I did before [and I know Tokyo pretty well as it is].
• Help two tourists find a branch of CitiBank in Ginza using Google Street View and the iPhone’s ‘Compass’ application, even though I didnt know where the CitiBank in Ginza was.
• Receive and send emails with locations in them, for me to find a place anf to send location-based information to other iPhone users.
• Shoot photos with the phone and have them immediately geotagged and placed on maps.

The power of the mapping and GPS capabilities of the iPhone are dawning on me now and I am full of ideas for how to use them in my work. All I need now is an app that alllows me set a start point, walk, shoot along the way and embed my shots, and record my route so I can save it and distribute it to other people via the web and email. Such an app must exist. If you know of one, drop me a line.

Social-Networking on the Move: I’ve used Flickr and Facebook for a while now but I never got the point if using Twitter from a desktop PC. But it’s now come alive for me with the iPhone. Combined witht he camera and other apps, in my first iPhone week I have…..

Started ‘twittering’ and begun a series of photographs, made with the Polarize app for the phone, which I have distributed whilst on the move. These photos are all about immediacy, time and location; me recording little moments of my life and rendering them up in a way that is more about the moment and sharing it than about the tippest-toppest quality of photography. I’ve started taking snapshots again, after a long time of – perhaps – being too serious about my photography.

Pushed Email Services: emailing on the move has been part of life as long as Japan has been a part of my life. Text messaging with SMS in the UK never did it for me, especially after experiencing full, proper email on a phone in Japan first back in 2000. But the device has a lot to do with how much you use the application and the iPhone has sped-up emailing for me, made it more convenient and allowed me to push my Gmail through to the device with ease and I have used email on my phone more this week than I ever did with the awful Sharp mobile I just ditched last week. Why?

• The iPhone makes typing easy even on a device as small as the phone is.
• Pushing email is easy to set up.
• Although there was no direct connector to import contacts from Thunderbird to my phone [I am a PC user and dont have all the 'sync' capabilities Mac users have with their iPhones], the Zindus application for Thunderbird allowed me to export all my contacts to Gmail and then, through the iPhone, import all the contacts from Gmail to my handset. Superb!
• The in-built mapping functions make it very easy to create, save and distribute precice location-based data by email.

Combined Camera and GPS device: I do a lot of photowalks in Tokyo and whilst I could go out and buy a GPS add-on for my Nikon D300, the main reason I would have done that would have been to record data in the photos I was using to illustrate my walks. Now I dont need to as the iPhone allows me to shoot pics and save them directly to maps whilst I am still on the move with no need to go home, download the pics and publish them up to online mapping services. As a photographer and photography teacher, the iPhone means….

• I can put some immediacy back into my work and get it out there for people to see more rapidly.
• I am ‘snapping’ again.
• I can see the potential of the device for photography apps and apps that combine photographs and location-based data.
• I am planning to develop a series of apps now I have experienced the power of the device myself [more news of these soon]

A gallery of shots from Alfie’s iPhone this week: [sadly, the superb NextGen gallery app for WordPress is not yet iPhone friendly. we are working on this though]

[Show picture list]

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The Fun and the Potential: with its GPS, its ability to shoot video and stills and its ability to react to touch and movement, the iPhone represents a tectonic leap and puts it in a league of its own, in my opinion. In my hand I now have…..

• A seisomometer – courtesy of the iSeismo application.
• A decibel-meter – courtesy of the SoundMeter aplication.
• An electronic compass.
• A map of anywhere – courtesy of Google Earth, maps and all the location-based services.
• One-click access, on the move, to clips of The Fast Show – courtesy of YouTube on the iPhone.
• A voice-recorder – courtesy of iTalk.
• Skype in my hand.
• A torch – courtesy of the Torch app.
• A complete Japanese dictionary and simple translator – courtesy of the Kotoba! and iDict applications.
• …and some fun games to while-away the time on the train: baseball, darts, cricket, ski-jumping, car-racing.

One week on and I can honestly say that I am truly iMpressed!!

Useful links:

Apptism.com – a great one-stop-shop website for searching and getting hold of free and paid-for apps for the iPhone.